WindStrike

Ahh I knew I shouldn't listened to the latest comments of "Flame towers are underpowered". Ah well, lol. Yeah, I regularly pull off 250k+ score just by playing Insane difficulty. Now, getting 500k+, THAT'S pretty difficult.

There's an endscore speed bonus and an endscore networth bonus that affects your total score after wave 55. It's incredibly improbably for the networth bonus to decrease it, but if you took a while to beat through wave 55, then it's probably coming from the speed bonus. Taking longer than 40 minutes will reduce your score. I usually play on insane, and yeah it does feel like the game got a little easier with the recent changes, but at the same time, frog hunting got harder due to getting less gold in the late-game.

We've been debating adding the elemental upgrades to the cannon/arrow towers back. I think it might be doable, I just worry that, like in the WC3 and SC2 versions, you'd be able to go through literally half the game without switching off. Granted, w/ 98% sell, that's not nearly as possible, but still rather iffy. I've had people on both ends of the stick tell me cannon is underpowered or overpowered. I'm not entirely sure whether to buff it or not, and if I do buff it, it'd be a very minor amount. As for straight adding more composite towers, we've had someone suggest being able to place mines on the course, which could be cool, I just... don't entirely see their purpose, relative to the other towers. I'm rather reluctant to support more composite towers as it'd shift the game away from the core concept of Elements and more towards these generic towers that are really only supposed to get you through the early game. On the flipside of things, we've still got two empty slots on the Builder, and one of our dev team is saying we should totally fill it with some new options, ie mines. It's a pretty iffy subject. At the moment, probably the closest thing we're considering is bringing back the elemental upgrades of Cannon & Arrow Towers, which would give a Tier 2 of what you were suggesting (not quite Composite though), just not a Tier 3. I might suggest bringing them back after Patch 1.5 (which, looking at preliminary estimates, will be completely changing the game). But, we're still welcome to ideas, so keep firin' away!

Oh wow, can't believe we didn't notice that. Thanks for pointing that out man, should be fixed next patch.

Well, apparently we still have stuff to do for Patch 1.4, so I apologize on the wait on that. However, we ended up reverting back to Patch 1.3 for the meantime, so the unplayableness is now gone... save for some of the questionable balance issues of Patch 1.3, cough Nature Tower cough cough. Sorry 'bout breaking the game, folks!

What's that, go faster? Well, I would "fix" that, but I've already moved on to Patch 1.4 stuff, so I can't patch up 1.322. Joke was fun while it lasted. Patch 1.4 should theoretically be up in a few hours, just waiting on some confirmation stuff mainly.

After some shenanigans with an April Fool's Patch, we're fixing up the actual issues from Patch 1.3, including some degree of balance and some bug fixes. Below is a preview of what's coming soon. I'm guessing within the next day or so, but I'm not positive. I believe there's a few things missing from this list that need to be confirmed, but when Patch 1.4 releases, I'll be sure to fix the list up. Anyhow, here's the preview! Fixes Numbers for Russian Tooltips should now be up to date, which should address the majority of the tooltip discrepancy issues. The text itself, though, is still WIP. Fixed the scoring on the waves, causing them to be worth 5 Score (per creep) less than intended, so each wave is worth a total of 150 Score more. This was a change that was supposed to make it in back in Patch 1.1, but it was bugged. Fixed an issue with Gunpowder Towers attacking too early with Attack Ground. Fixed Interest breaking after restarting in Sandbox Mode. Scrolling up/down on the In-game Leaderboard no longer causes you to also zoom in/out respectively. Balance General Classic & Express Bounty Formulas were tweaked. Nutshell, they were flattened out a little, so you'll get a little bit more gold early on, allowing you more flexibility and the ability to accrue interest better. However, roughly 10k to 20k gold has been lopped off the last 10-15 waves (or about 3-6 in Express), which incidentally, makes it harder to kill the Icefrogs due to a weaker end-game defense... and a lot less gold in reserve. Aka, you no longer receive 50% of your networth from the last few waves alone. Speaking of Icefrogs, guess what, we're not reverting last week's change. Instead, the point multiplier has increased from 15% per wave to 25% per wave. Express Mode starting hp has been increased from 78 to 90. However, hp scaling has reduced from x1.336 to x1.329 per wave. It's similar to that change we applied to Classic sometime back, where the end-game hp is still the same, it's just a higher starting hp and a lower curve. Endgame Score Bonuses of Total Networth and End Speed are now multiplicative with each other instead of additive. Rush Mode now gives a +25% Bounty Bonus up from +20%. Creeps Regeneration has been altered. Regen itself reduced from 3% to 2.5% per second. Regen cap has been increased from 75% to 100%. Overall, this is a nerf and shouldn't steamroll low efficiency builds nearly as bad. Time Lapse jump-back time increased from 3 to 4 seconds. Avenger damage reduction duration increased from 5 to 6 seconds. Towers Nature Tower ability altered. It now has the Force of Nature ability. For every creep near its target within 125 AoE, its damage is increased by 10%. This has little impact early game, but with slowing, it now scales a whole lot better. BAT reverted from 0.66 to 0.31 Damage reduced from 115 / 750 / 4860 / 48600 to 70 / 455 / 2960 / 29600 Aka, its pretty much where it used to be back in Patch 1.2, except now it has an ability that makes it scale better. Water Tower ability tweaked. Its splash now reduces by 40 (Full & Half) with each bounce. Damage increased from 17 / 111 / 720 / 7200 to 22 / 143 / 930 / 9300 Bounce Range increased from 150 to 550 Tower should now be about where it used to be in Patch 1.2 and is no longer OP as heck early, but it should also scale better than before. Light Tower tweaked. BAT altered from 1 to 0.66. Damage decreased from 150 / 975 / 6340 / 63400 to 100 / 650 / 4225 / 42250. Ability Damage also decreased from 6 / 39 / 255 / 2550 to 4 / 26 / 170 / 1700 DPS is about the same, it's just more usable like this. Fire Tower buffed. Damage increased from 8 / 52 / 340 / 3400 to 10 / 65 / 425 / 4250. Ability Damage increased from 2 / 13 / 85 / 850 to 3 / 20 / 130 / 1300. Should be about where it was in Patch 1.2, but scales better. Hail Tower critical damage increased from 350% to 400% Tidal Tower range reduced from 900 to 700 Annnd that's it for this version! There's a number of towers that are iffy on balance; however, due to a major balance issue with the game, I'm not going to touch those towers yet, and instead focus on that balance issue for Patch 1.5, which may take up to two weeks to apply. By the time it's done, it may end up coinciding with some major much-needed content release, depending on how things go. We'll see.

Glad to know you folks enjoy it... kinda. It seems there's a lot of negative reactions to the actual patch itself, so... expect 1.4 to come out for realsies later today. Still trying to balance test it.

Due to serious allegations by our own staff that our game is a rip-off of an older version, we will be renaming the game to Elephant Towel Defense. As such, all Towers will be replaced with Towels, and all creeps will be humanized and renamed to Unfortunate Bystanders. This change will redefine Towel Defenses everywhere. However, we have too little work and too much time, so those changes will take some time to implement. In the meantime, below is a preview of the next patch, to be released on Saturday, April 2nd. General: Patch 1.4 was considered incredibly OP and was nerfed by a random and unbiased percentage. It will now be referred to as Patch 1.322. The Leaderboard has been renamed to the Democracyboard. Now, your Replays will be voted upon by the entire DOTA 1 & 2 communities, as well as Twitch Chat. Fixed a minor bug that allowed Icefrog to balance the game. Fixed an exploit that prevented Firetoad from developing the game. Fixed an issue that allowed players to select Normal Difficulty. Interest now gives you gold based on how much interest the internet has given to the game. Due to balance reasons, Reddit has been excluded from consideration. Constantly selling all of your towers prior to every Interest tick is now mandatory. Failure to do so will decrease your APM, and if you fall below 300 APM, you will be banned from playing the game. We advocate high intensity edge-of-your-seat levels of play that can only be achieved by abusing core game mechanics so that casters can remark how amazing your selling tactics are every 15 seconds. Due to lack of use, the Abyssal Underlord has been removed from the game. Modes: Difficulties have been revamped Normal has been changed to Easy Mode, which is required for any of our SC2 Element TD players. Hard has been removed from the game. Very Hard is not a real word. Insane has been replaced with Bullet Hell Lunatic Mode, which requires your Builder to dodge and defeat creeps swarming from all directions simultaneously. Any time you get hit, one of your towers is randomly removed from the game's code. Rush Mode was rushed in development. We apologize for taking so much time on it. It has been changed to Strolling Mode. All creeps will now take their time to appreciate the view and occasionally stop to check out your towers. Chaos Mode causes Chaos Control to periodically occur. Do not mistake these for Lag Spikes or Connection Errors, as we have also upgraded from Dedicated Servers to Fully Dedicated Dial-Up Servers. Our philosophy is that if it costs more, it must be worth more, and this is no exception. Random Mode causes towers to appear, fire, disappear, move, and update the game at random times. Express Mode can now be taken to-go. Creeps: Undead Creeps now reduce your lives when they revive. Shield Creeps are now naturally invulnerable and become vulnerable only when you look at them. S-s-senpai, notice them! Healing Creeps now stalk you at night, jump you when you're injured, and bandage that cut you got before it gets any worse. Due to continuous advertisements, Ronald McDonald Creeps have been removed from the game. Fixed a bug that allowed Icefrogs to die. All the Time Lapse creeps just time-traveled to the future to stop the robot apocalypse. Regeneration Creeps can now assimilate towers. Resistance is futile. Speed Creeps have been removed from the game, due to speeding ticket costs. Slow Creeps have been removed from the game for not making it on time. Bulky Creeps now have been added back with Collision Detection. Should any of them touch your towers as they brush by, call the cops. Fixed a major exploit that replaced Icefrogs with Stone Boars on Wave 1. We apologize for allowing you to win and will make sure every patch is balanced meticulously with carefully timed nerfs. Eventually, we hope to add a delay time between the start of the game and Wave 1 that uses a countdown timer for Half-Life 3. However, due to our numbers system lacking the digits for such a timer to exist, development has been stalled as we work to develop a new language powered by a Quantum Computer. When Creeps are threatened, the Avenger Creeps will assemble to save the day and help defeat your evil towers as they monologue their plans for maximum DPS. Illusion Creeps have been added. They're just a figment of your imagination. Time Lapse creeps have been renamed to Memory Lapse creeps. Every time they leak, they cause memory fragmentation and memory leaks. Wait, what's a memory leak? Who am I? A new creep ty- Time Lapse Creep from the future here, chariots chariots, the robot apocalypse is not real because it was destroyed by THE LEMONS. Towers: Single Element Fixed a bug that allowed Single Elements to get married. Water Tower It now quenches the thirst of creeps, causing them to stop for a moment and get a drink of water. When you sell Water Tower, it now sells all of your other towers and randomly deletes random parts of code. Attempting to build another Water Tower will cause the mayor to denounce your ownership of the monopoly on water. Fire Tower It now sets itself on fire as it gradually burns to its own death. Nature Tower A 5th Tier Tower has been added. Once you have 4 Pure Nature Towers you can merge them to summon Mother Nature herself, who will then summon a march of exploding penguins that destroy all creeps, narrated by Morgan Freeman narrating himself. Earth Tower Ability changed from mini-stunning creeps to being fabulously stunning to creeps. Every time an Earth Tower kills a creep, it poses for the camera and shows off its stunningly shiny rocks. Light Tower If the tower reaches 30 Stacks on a single creep, it will now call down the power of the stars themselves by first dropping the sun into the game. We do not guarantee your computer's safety as it approaches critical mass. Darkness Tower Now fires ninjas from within the shadows of its projectiles. If you can see them, it's because there's a knife in your back. If you can't see them, that's unfortunate. You might want to inspect the knife in your back. Dual Element Fixed an exploit that allowed Dual Elements to get divorced. Fixed a bug that prevented Dual Elements from challenging each other to a D-D-D-D-DUEL! Gunpowder Now has a 10% chance to explode on firing due to shrapnel getting stuck in the gun. When it does explode, Sniper will scream "DE-NIED!". Magic Due to copyright issues from at least one thousand sources, it has been renamed to Imagination Tower. It now shoots whatever it dreams of, like a cream-filled alligator that fires heat-seeking killer bees while playing calm and tranquil screamo song. Imaaaaaagination! Trickery Tricks you into building a clone of itself, only to clone you and use your clone to take over in your place. Silly player, tricks are for kids! Disease It will now periodically cough, and the longer it lives, the sicker it gets. Do that tower a favor man and sell it now, put it out of its misery, you terrible, terrible person! Poison It has been arrested for giving Disease Tower cancer, and in its place, you appear to be vomiting. Here, just use a Darkness Tower instead, and have a knife time! Blacksmith Has been renamed to the John Smith Tower, and it is now the most generic tower in the game. It no longer increases the damage of other towers due to claims of slavery back when it was a Black Smith. Quark It can no longer attack due to have a Quark popped right up in its- Moss Now actively grows moss on nearby terrain to make it look nice and spiffy! However, it does react well with the Lava Sector, and instead sets both itself and all nearby towers on fire for adding oil to the flames. A warrant for Moss Tower's arrest has been made, but due to its ashes dispersing into the air, it has yet to be found. Hydro Has been upgraded with Hydraulic powers, enabling it to pressure blast enemies and pressuring them into quitting their jobs. The creeps claim they are underpaid, but their bounties prove otherwise. Electricity Standard attack replaced with Zeus' Thundergod's Wrath ability. You will now be blinded by strobe lightning faster than ever before. Flame Has been removed for the game for breaking forum rules. Seriously folks, don't flame, or you'll get burned. Vapor The fumes... I'm so high right now. Life Here at Unknown Company Name Accused of Ripping Off Nameless NPC Company Name, we believe in the proactive nature of restoring lives and defeating cancer. Now, Life Tower revives any creeps they shoot dead. Which then makes them... Undead? Ice Every time it fires, it plays a random variation of Let it Go from the wide assortment of the internet itself. In its full length. Every time, and even when the tower is gone. If you don't like it, that's too bad, you'll just have to let it go. Well Has been renamed from Well Tower to Good Tower. Had we not changed it, we would've risked time-traveling Grammar Nazis shooting the moon itself at us. We apologize for the inconvenience and are making sure it will never happen cause we're firing the sun at ourselves. ... wait- Triple Element Polygamy between elements is now legal. Due to imbalance, Polygamy is no longer possible, but still legal. Flamethrower Has been renamed to Flame Chucker, in memory of our great Chuck Flamer, whose flamehouse kick could grill a steak to perfection faster than you can eat a chinchilla chihuahua. Laser Renamed to Taser Tower after supposed abuse issues with causing creeps to go blind. Please avoid pointing Laser Pointers at other people. It's not nice. ... but it is fun! Root Renamed to Groot Tower, which now dances all night long, baby. Muck Aghanim's Scepter ability added: Now shoots its goo at all targets within 700 AoE of itself. Runic Unchanged. Jinx Due to being fed up with nerfs, it has equipped some new weapons and can switch modes. It also has a killer witchin' groovin' pop track playing at all times when firing. Erosion Has been removed from physics and the laws of nature itself due to Time being OP. Obliteration Has been renamed to Disaster Tower, its range limit removed, and its AoE scaling infinitely. Now, when it drops a 1000+ AoE attack, it will scream IT'S A DISASTAH! Hail Has been changed to Hell Tower and now drops the following on all enemies, towers, and builders (if on Lunatic Mode). Hail Lightning Fire Firetoads Firetoad Meteors Firetoads with Machine Guns that shoot Icefrog Meteor Missiles Flooding Puddles of water now last inifinitely, and once enough water has flooded the area, your Towers will go for a swim. Money Increases your Interest Rate by 2% / 4%. Each kill increases it again by 0.1% / 0.2%. Quake After a long wait of many years, Quake 5 has officially been announced! It will also include an anime mini-series and a full CG Movie, both of which are being produced by Reddit's DOTA Community. It will certainly cause a landslide at the box office! Incantation Has been changed to the Indentation Towers, moving any tower that's nearby by 4 spaces to the right. And 4 more. And 4 more. And 4 more. And 4- Polar Has been removed from the game for aiding in the attempt to flood our planet with Global Warming. As Flooding has been found to be a co-conspirator, both have been removed from existence and replaced with Nameless NPCs. Due to imbalance, Nameless NPCs have been removed from the game. Ephemeral Now lasts for 1 second before it automatically sells itself. You'll need to increase those edge-of-the-seat APM levels if you want to maximize its efficiency properly! Nova Has been changed to the Noya Tower, which now reprograms all creeps that come in contact with it to exit Noya's game and attack all other games. However, due to a temporal paradox involving Trickery Tower cloning Noya Tower and Noya himself into tricking the code to attack itself, Noya has inadvertently created an army to create another army to attack the original army into attacking himself, and he is now MIA. In his place, DOTA 2's Bot Guy will be taking over as Element TD's Lead Programmer. He's expected to arrive when Half-Life 3 releases. Windstorm Has been changed to the Windstrike Tower. Simply having it prevents you from losing. However, due its high skill requirement and extreme lack of balancing, building one will instantly cause you to lose. Impulse Now attacks impulsively and preemptively, in an attempt to preempt the preemptiveness. This should help fix its late-game issues of being late for the game. Tidal When you start losing, she will sing Song of the Siren, and not stop. Additionally, all other towers you have will change to Tidal Towers and join the chorus, which progressively gets louder and louder until you win the game... by crashing your computer, breaking your speakers, and sending your ears to the hospital. The ocean would be proud. Haste Whirling Axes has been buffed allow its Infuriating stacks to hit other Builders, causing Raging Blindness, with the intention to fully blind other players. Throwing Axes' Troll Physics is now proportionately based off your Networth. For every 100 Gold you have, it fires an extra Axe. For every 1 Gold you don't have, it fires an extra Axe. Fervor removes the maximum Attack Speed cap, and it passively grows over time. HAX have been applied to just rain down Firetoads if you start losing. UMADBRO? Battle Trance has been altered to Dance Trax. The faster Trol- I mean Haste Tower fires, the faster he dances, which gradually spawns singularities at random points in time and space, sucking up anyone and anything that fails to dance as fast. Additionally, Global Annoyance now affects all creeps and towers, forcing them to dance. Flame War has caused all towers and creeps in the game to be banned by forum rules. Builder Due to lack of use, it has been removed from the game. It won't take enough time to apply those changes, so in the meantime, here's the changes we are applying: All tower and creep abilities were tweaked a tiny bit. As we felt this change wasn't enough to impact the game significantly, we ended up not updating the Tooltips. All towers now have 20,000 Range. We hope we have addressed the elephant in the room with this patch in preparation for Elephant Towel Defense, fixing many of the balance issues that have plagued our existence.

Later down the road, I wanna eventually apply a patch that fixes something. It's intended by design that higher tier towers are more efficient than lower tier towers, so logically, Quality > Quantity. However... it's skewed too much towards quality. To the extend that a number of builds (especially when you get random'd them) get horribly screwed over, and especially with build order. Like, you can't do a straight 6-element rush. It just sucks cause it's horribly inefficient. Late-game, once most of them are level 2, then it's great, but until then, we like to refer to it as ran-doom-ed. This all started when I started tweaking costs and looking at DPS/Gold Values via this chart (which I know is out-of-date and isn't sortable yet cause I suck at spreadsheet functions). Anyhow, I was thinking the jump between the tiers on Dual-Element Towers was really high compared to everything else, so I started cutting down costs on Single-Element & Triple-Element Towers. Then thar was the scaling changes and moar cost changes, whatever, blah blah blah. Nutshell, I screwed up a balancing thing without realizing it. Anywho, I want some input towards this regard. I was thinking of increasing the gold costs of all Tier 2 & 3 Towers (regardless of whether they're Single, Double, or Triple Element), with the idea being this'd nerf quality enough so that quantity still matters. Obviously it wouldn't be nearly as efficient, but it should be viable to some degree. That said, I'd probably also reduce the hp scaling hike on the creeps a bit as well. I probably won't attempt to apply this for another 2-3 weeks, there's various other fixes and things that we're gonna test out before this happens. In the meantime, I'd like some input and suggestions towards this matter.

Huh, I'm surprised, I thought this patch made the early game easier, especially with OP water tower, lol. I know last patch made early game harder. We're still trying to figure out what the heck is causing that selling bug. I'm guessing there's something else happening at the same time as the sell that causes the break.

Gentlemen, behold... intelligence corn! This week's update brings abilities to single-element towers, some new features, and yet another rushed balance patch, this one being even moreso rushed than last week's (except it's not our fault this time). That said, expect another patch to show up in about 2-3 days after this one (along with another leaderboard reset), unless this one happens to so magically work, which I doubt. General Leaderboard (will be) reset and is now functional again. The base map now holds 4 players. Removed the _full 6 player map. Added Attack Range Overlay when hovering over upgrades. Added Speed Up and Restart Game buttons to Sandbox. Fixed Ephemeral Tower not keeping its damage reduction on upgrade/cancel. Fixed Custom Wisp Set and Custom Model Rewards. Fixed Ranking Badge at game start and hover portrait. Scoring Frog points per kill increased from 150 to 200. This is a temporary fix and will probably get reverted on the follow-up balance patch. Max speed bonus reduced from +120% to +90% per wave, so it reduces by 3% per second, instead of 4% per second. Single Element Abilities Water Has the Water Bullet ability. Its attack bounces up to 3 times, with a 150 bounce range. Damage is constant the whole way, and all attacks deal 100/200 AoE. Damage reduced from 60 / 390 / 2535 / 25350 to 17 / 111 / 720 / 7200 This should be up to 13.3% better against groups, but is now the worst Single-Element tower vs. single targets. Might be a little OP early-game. Fire Has the Blaze ability. Causes a stacking, single-target DoT debuff on all targets hit. Damage is applied per second, and it lasts for 3 seconds. Damage reduced from 18 / 117 / 760 / 7600 to 8 / 52 / 340 / 3400 Blaze Damage deals 2 / 13 / 85 / 850 per second Has about the same starting balance, should scale better with slowing in the late-game. Nature Has the Spore Explosion ability. When this tower kills a target, the target explodes, causing an explosion that hits all creeps in a 150/300 AoE. This can cause chain explosions, similar to Flamethrower's Napalm effect. BAT altered from 0.31 to 0.66 Damage increased from 72 / 470 / 3050 / 30500 to 115 / 750 / 4860 / 48600 Spore Explosion deals 24 / 156 / 1020 / 10200 This... might be OP? Not sure. Earth Has the Landslide ability. Causes 0.1 second mini-stuns to the primary target hit (so splash doesn't cause it). Creeps cannot be mini-stunned more than once per second. This is a temporary ability, expect it to be replaced, either in the follow-up patch or a later patch. Also, didn't touch the rest of its balance. Light Has the Intensity ability. Each consecutive attack against a target gives a flat damage increase, with no stack limit. Resets completely on switching targets. Aka, it's a quasi-Quark Tower. BAT altered from 0.66 to 1 Damage increased from 100 / 650 / 4225 / 42250 to 150 / 975 / 6340 / 63400 Intensity Stack Damage deals 6 / 39 / 255 / 2550 per stack. Darkness Has the Overkill ability. When it kills a target, any damage that would be considered overkill instead tranfers to a target within 300 AoE of the dead target. For example, if it hits a 100 hp creep with a 260 damage shot, 160 damage will transfer to another creep. This can only proc once per kill. BAT altered from 1 to 1.5 Damage increased from 180 / 1170 / 7600 / 76000 to 260 / 1690 / 11000 / 110000 Its DPS actually went down a bit, cause dear god Overkill fixes this tower so badly. Balance Duals Life Tower damage increased from 280 / 1680 / 10080 to 300 / 1800 / 10800 Moss Tower damage decreased from 130 / 780 / 4680 to 120 / 720 / 4320 Triples Flamethrower Tower damage increased from 400 / 2000 to 450 / 2250 Haste Tower damage increased from 900 / 4500 to 950 / 4750 Hail Tower altered a bit. It now has a 15% chance to cause 350% crit damage on its attacks. Note that when it fires the spread-shot, this applies on an individual basis per attack, not "15% to crit all or crit none". Attacks Required reduced from 15 to 14 Damage reduced from 1000 / 5000 to 800 / 4000 Patch is live!

That was a point some other folks brought up a number of times. It's pretty hard to balance between both the casual player and the expert player. For example, Gold Tower keeps getting constantly tweaked so that's usable for both, whereas back in say the SC2 version, it was pretty much only usable for experts (and by usable, I mean super broken, lol) and useless for casual players. We'll be adding new content over the next month that caters to both, or rather, new content that we add will be usable by both, obviously on different levels. Not sure i like the investment system idea, it's similar to how people were breaking the game prior to the interest locking on leaks, where they'd leak a bunch of the initial waves to gain super gold. Interest is already pretty abusable, it's probably best not to make it worse.

Not quite. Old SC2/WC3 Tidal Towers were god for clearing the waves, but then fell off horribly once it hit the end-game. Hail Tower has kinda been like that; recent patch, I guess they're underpowered and need some fixing, though I was actually balancing it in comparison with Impulse Tower, which is a tower that's good at all stages of the game, provided you have a decent enough build to back it up (ie, F N W D). I do really like the crit idea for the tower, gonna try it out for next patch (which won't be for another week). In the meantime, I'll just be running a hotfix on it that decreases the attacks required + increases damage a bit cause yeah, relative to Impulse Tower, well... Impulse outdoes Hail by quite a bit. I recall Vapor Tower was another tower that's pretty much good for all stages of the the game until the end-game, and I attempted a tweak on it, and apparently I need to attempt yet another bloody tweak on that tower. Game balance philosophy has changed so that in theory, AoE deals the most damage w/ support, but ultimately can't finish, so ideally, a mix of both would create the best defense. Some of my really good builds don't use slowing, but they do use AoE + Single-target.... + damage amp. Heck, I've even done all single-target before, and it can work. Ideally, I would love for the philosophy to change off of "DPS isn't the sole means of victory", buuuuuut doing that would require more than just rebalancing and sticking abilities on everything. The game, currently, is structured around DPS, sooo I'd probably hold that philosophy either for a PvP mode or a possible Element TD 2 for down-the-road.

I dunno, ever since the nerf from I think... Version 1.1? It's not been that godly. Yeah, maybe it's a little strong for the Pure Rush strategy, but there's a number of other tower combinations easily capable of doing the Pure Rush strat, like straight Trickery Rush or going for level 2 Impulse Tower and then for a Pure Water after that. It's a great finisher tower, but... not sure I'd call it overpowered. Admittedly, the attack speed increase on it was actually meant as a temporary change. Next patch, all the single-element towers are receiving abilities, so, I mean... I could nerf it, but it won't make a difference once the abilities are added, cause then we'd have to look at balance again for all the towers again. I am running a hotfix patch in the next day or so, so... I'll look into it.

So currently, I've noticed consistently, the game runs smooth in 3-player games, but 6-player, no matter what, is a lag fest until at least two people drop off. I'd like to suggest just going with one version of the map being a 4-player game. This would also go in-line with consistency for, ahem, later modes that are based around 4 players, and we won't want to clutter the initial map choice.

Whee, it's another balance update! There's a few fixes, but for the most part, it's one massive tower balance update, including a number of small reworks. Here we go! General Added Range Filters to the Tower Table Ingame Leaderboards now show the Top 100 Ranks! Improved reconnection handling Fixed a rare case where towers could be stacked when two upgrades were queued simultaneously while upgrading. Creeps Classic Base HP increased from 34 to 40. Classic HP Scaling per wave decreased from 18.8% to 18.4% Classic End-game HP is unchanged. Nutshell, for the first third of the game, it'll feel like a wave stronger, the second third, it'll feel like half a wave stronger, and you probably won't notice by the last third of the game. This change was made due to early game apparently being too easy relative to the latter half of the game. It'll still be easier, just not that much easier. Express HPs were not changed. Towers Singles Fire Tower increased from 17 / 110 / 720 / 7200 to 18 / 117 / 760 / 7600 Earth Tower increased from 45 / 293 / 1900 / 19000 to 48 / 312 / 2030 / 20300 Duals Dual Element Towers now have a damage scaling of x6, up from x5. Tier 2 costs 900 to upgrade (1350 Total), and Tier 3 costs 2300 to upgrade (3650 Total). This is about a 7.5% DPS/Gold Value increase to Tier 2 Duals and about a 20% increase to Tier 3 Duals. Blacksmith Tower effect at Tier 3 has been increased from 90% to 100%. Well Tower effect at Tier 3 has been increased from 90% to 100%. Trickery Tower effect at Tier 3 has been increased from 60 seconds to 70 seconds. Blacksmith / Well / Trickery Towers damage increased from 450 / 2250 / 11250 to 450 / 2700 / 16200 Disease Tower damage increased from 50 / 250 / 1250 to 50 / 300 / 1800 Electricity Tower altered. Its Bounce Range now decreases by 30% per bounce, but its bounce limit has been increased from 3 to 10. Damage altered from 170 / 850 / 4250 to 150 / 900 / 5400 In other words, it actually scales with slowing now. Flame Tower single-target damage reduced from 75 / 375 / 1875 to 40 / 240 / 1440. However, AoE damage increased from 30 / 150 / 750 to 40 / 240 / 1440. Yes, it's no longer a watered down version of Flooding Tower (HEYOOOOOO). Gunpowder Tower damage increased from 30 / 150 / 750 to 30 / 180 / 1080 Hydro Tower damage increased from 270 / 1350 / 6750 to 300 / 1800 / 10800 Ice Tower damage increased from 135 / 675 / 3375 to 135 / 810 / 4860 Life Tower effect altered! Kills to get a life increased from 3 / 1.5 / 1 to 6 / 4 / 2. However, it now only requires double the kills when you have at least 50 life, down from triple. Damage increased from 280 / 1400 / 7000 to 280 / 1680 / 10080 It's still a good tower, just not "impossible to die" or horribly abusable levels of stupidity. Magic Tower damage increased from 600 / 3000 / 15000 to 600 / 3600 / 21600 Moss Tower effect altered to increase by 1% per 2% of target's hp, instead of per 1%. Damage increased from 100 / 500 / 2500 to 130 / 780 / 4680 Poison Tower damage increased from 200 / 1000 / 5000 to 200 / 1200 / 7200 Quark Tower tweakbatted. Its effect increases by 15% per attack instead of 20%, but its max stacks are increased from 7 to 15. Its damage is increased from 160 / 800 / 4000 to 160 / 960 / 5760 Vapor Tower base damage decreased from 20 / 100 / 500 to 5 / 30 / 180. Effect damage increased from 20 / 100 / 500 to 20 / 120 / 720. Effect AoE increased from 350 to 450. If you're wondering why it even has a base damage, I blame balancing shenanigans. Overall, the tower is better at all stages of the game with the AoE increase. Triples Roots & Erosion Towers now use stacks to show their damage over time instances. Jinx Tower effect got a nerfbat. Duration decreased from 7.5 to 5 seconds, ticks reduced from 3 to 2. It's still strong, just not super broken like before. Runic Tower got a tweakbat. Damage increased from 1000 / 5000 to 1200 / 6000; however, its ability effect only hits 150 AoE, down from 200 AoE. Without slowing, this has no effect on the tower, and the damage increase should help it early-mid game. However, it doesn't scale as stupidly with slowing anymore. Gold Tower effect reduced from 25% / 50% to 20% / 30%. Damage increased from 4000 / 20000 to 4500 / 22500 Erosion Tower effect increased from 10% / 30% to 12% / 36% Windstorm Tower damage increased from 300 / 1500 to 350 / 1750 Hail Tower effect has changed. Every 15 attacks, it'll shoot every target in range. And yes, with 1500 range, that's a lot of targets. It should also be less buggy than before, since old version had a tendency to only shoot 2 targets sometimes. Ephemeral Tower effect only drops down to 30%, instead of 20%. Patch is expected to go up sometime on March 18th.

Quark tower was bloody silly with 8+ stacks with everything as is (seriously, soloing through Wave 20 with three Level 1 Quark towers on Insane? wha?). It'll genuinely need more tweaking than just a stack count change. For life tower, the one I find causes the most issues is the level 2 one actually, so in vein of the dual element support towers, how about 4 / 3 / 1? Given its DPS/Gold value, it is a lot closer to a support tower than a damage tower. LOL dat Hail Tower change. It'd probably have to be changed to something like "every 10 attacks, shoot all targets in range". I'd be cool with that. Heck, it may be possible to run a separate visual effect on it, like Luna's Lucent Beam, so it actually rains down from the sky. Twould be glorious. For Electricity, oh man, that uhh.. well, 150 would be overkill, but given we're thinking essentially applying a damage decreasing bouncing attack to one of the single-element towers (aka current electricity), yeah I'd be fine with flipping its effect.

As fun as that'd theoretically be, it'd still horribly broken. There's a reason you can't get two of the Level 3 Dual Support Towers in the game, and it's due to just how insane the damage output gets. Try this in Sandbox - go straight to Wave 55 on Insane with 2 periodic towers, a Level 3 Well, a Level 3 Blacksmith, and a Level 3 Trickery tower. It doesn't require much gold at all, and it absolutely decimates everything. Not to mention being able to stack all the Level 2 Triple Supports. So in total, all you'd need is (8 * 4500) + (3 * 3000) + (2 * 11000) = 67,000 gold, and given Insane difficulty normally gives what, over 100k by itself... even with reduced gold amounts, you'd still be able to do really stupid amounts of things. Now, mixed waves like you mentioned, aka old WC3 Chaos Mode, I would totally be up for seeing how that'd play out.

Yeah, there's a number of towers that have long ranges that are, well... a little too high in damage. Runic obviously being at the very top of that group. That tower has been a problem even back in the SC2 version. So... we could try to half the ability damage, or as noted, we could drop the range down to say a 700 or 900 range tower. Though that'd be ironic, given two of its elements are Dark and Light, the highest two tower ranges. Gold tower, my issue with it isn't the level 1 version. It's the level 2 version. I've been considering just making it one flat percentage for both levels, and because it's also a somewhat decent finisher tower, leveling it up would still be worth it. So maybe increase the damage to 4500 / 22500, drop bounty on both levels to 20%. Funny story about Quark Tower - before the max stacks was added, it was broken. Not the level 3 version, but the Level 2 version. Idea was go max support 6-ele build, then drop a level 2 quarks on the peninsulas, w/ lasers at the very end. You don't want to even know how dumb it got to. Guess I overnerfed though since that... hilarity. It is supposed to be arguably one of the strongest towers late-game, just not to the extent that it dominates everything else without question, so yeah, I'll try tweaking it a bit. My only problem with that suggested hail change is that it makes it a little too close to runic, though then again, it kinda already is close to runic. There was an idea a while back that actually reversed its effect, so by default, it'd shoot at 3 targets at a time, but it could go single-target power mode for a few seconds, and the idea was the auto-cast wasn't entirely necessary, you could actually turn it off. So it could then prove to be a decent finisher tower, instead of "decent for 3 seconds, useless for 3 seconds". Ephemeral/Impulse only fall off late cause in general, single-target falls off late-game. Slows provide exponential damage amplification for AoE, whereas single-target just gets a few more hits off. It's a bit of a tradeoff that I'm not sure how to really fix. Haste tower has the same issue, it just falls down into nothingness in the endgame. Laser is only so good late cause when it does solo-hit creeps, its DPS is so god darn high in comparison to the rest of the single-target towers it doesn't matter. I suppose we could attempt to nerf tier 2 slowing towers, but I'm honestly a little iffy on messing with that balance, cause it would easily disrupt the balance of the whole game. I would prefer to see if we could tweak other stuff first before resorting to such a drastic measure. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this how jinx actually works right now? Tier 1: 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 = x1.33 Tier 2: 1.3 * 1.3 * 1.3 = x2.19 Cause if so, that is beyond silly. That practically begs Erosion and Enchantment to get buffed a bit in addition to Jinx getting nerfed. Polar, on the other hand, I'd be seriously hesitant to buff it.

Note to self - develop that god darn PvP mode faster. I mean, what? We totally don't actually know what we're planning, right? Eh, I like to see micro as choosing what does what at any given time, not causing arthritis at a rate of 100 seconds per second, however the heck that even works.

That's cause stop was never intended to work to stop towers from attacking, lol. We aim not to create the game of APM; you want that, just go play SC2 and enjoy having to manually select 'spawn larva' every 20 seconds or so. Who needs autocast when you've got 500 APM?

By ~20 seconds back, you mean they go the way back to the entrance? Huh, we had that bug in testing, thought we fixed it. Guess not. Wait, Life Towers get charges for hitting undead creeps before reincarnation? That's actually a bug, not the temporal thingy.

Whelp, took two weeks, but it looks like some folks finally realize how strong Runic Tower is after my original top-spot using it. And Laser Tower. I was debating balancing those for some time, but I wanted to wait till people started to actually use them first, so I could get some input. Along with a number of other towers. So, this is all just theoretical, I'm not applying any of this just yet, as I'd like some opinions on it. Runic Tower I got no idea how to balance this tower. It's kinda sucky early, but once it gets all the support, it becomes godly late-game. I wanna find a way to round it out a bit, so it's not sucky early, but not as godly late-game. Laser Tower Maybe a little bit of a damage nerf? Though, this thing really sucks vs. Temporal & Undead creeps, though I guess that's the point. Life Tower So here's one I've been debating for a while, especially since the game got overall harder. Should the damage go down, should the effect not be as strong, or both? I'd really like some opinions on this one. Gold Tower Admittedly, I've been slowly tweaking this tower each patch just to see if anyone would finally realize how strong it is. Damage nerf, effect nerf, or both? Electricity Tower Strong early, but falls off so hard in the late-game cause it synergizes with bloody nothing. Probably needs a rework, though I'd like to keep the bouncing effect if possible. Vapor Tower Strong early, stays strong through the whole game if you go the double-slowing build, but then suddenly falls off at the end-game. If you don't go the double slowing build, it sucks. Poison Tower Does anyone even use this tower? Tempted to buff it just to see it get used, but at the same time, this isn't DOTA 2 balancing. Quark Tower Kay, the recent changes to this tower makes it a lot better early but not nearly as strong late. I'm going to be tweaking this tower again to increase the max stacks, but decrease the consecutive damage bonus, such that it's still about as good as it is now early, but scales up partially to what it used to be late-game (aka, w/ some support core). Hydro Tower Strong the whole game, and then falls off horribly end-game for reasons I can't figure out. Flame Tower Strong early, falls off mid-game, goes back to strong in late-game w/ support. Not sure if it needs balancing or not. I am tempted to buff its single-target damage up a bit. Jinx Tower Is its effect too strong? I see it get used over every other support tower by a longshot. Hail Tower For clearing the waves, it's a decent tower. Falls off horribly late-game though, mainly due to lack of synergizing, like Electricity Tower. Lemme know what your guys' thoughts on the above list is! Or heck, any other towers that feel a little weak or possibly a little strong.

Woops, in-game should say 7, and I knew I missed a tooltip somewhere. Thanks!